Princeton's Edward Felten finally described in public how he
bypassed the copy-protection methods created by the Secure Digital Music
Initiative (SDMI).

You probably know the backstory, but here's a
brief overview just in case. The SDMI is a consortium of 200+ music and
technology companies. Last September it offered a reward of up to $10,000
to anyone who could bypass its experimental copy protection schemes on a music
CD in less than a month. Felten and his team broke five of the six in
three weeks. They refused the prize money so that they would be free to
publish their methods and results.

Felten planned to present his team's
work at a Pittsburgh conference in April, but cancelled his talk when a lawyer
from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wrote him a
threatening letter. The RIAA later said that the letter was not a threat
to sue. However, since the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)
prohibits bypassing copy-protection on copyrighted works, even for academic
purposes, Felten worried about liability. The recent arrest of Dmitry
Sklyarov has proved that Felten's fears were justified. In June, Felten
asked a U.S. District Court to declare that he has a First Amendment right to
give his presentation, and to overturn the parts of the DMCA that would stop
him, but the court has not yet ruled. In its motion to dismiss Felten's
lawsuit, the RIAA repeated its insistence that it was not Felten's legal
adversary. With that assurance, Felten agreed to give his presentation
last night at the Usenix Security Symposium, in Washington, D.C.

Felten
has said he will continue to press his lawsuit even after he presents his
paper. In my view he is right to do so. Sklyarov is being prosecuted
even though Adobe has dropped its complaint against him. Even if the RIAA
doesn't file a legal complaint against Felten, a zealous prosecutor could still
prosecute him. In that sense, he needs a court to defang the DMCA and
affirm his First Amendment right to describe his research in public.
However, a court disinclined to examine the merits of his claim could decide
that it is moot now that he has given his presentation.

If you're reading this, then you
probably know about the Public Library of Science (PLoS), one of the boldest
recent FOS initiatives. It all started with a March 23 letter to the
editor of _Science Magazine_ signed by Richard Roberts, Harold Varmus, and eight
others. The gist of the letter was to call on biomedical journals to put
their contents online, free of charge, in public archives, within six months of
print publication. The call has since been widened to all scientific and
scholarly journals. Roberts, Varmus, et al. also called on scientists to
sign a pledge not to "publish in, edit or review for, or personally subscribe
to" journals that do not heed the call. The web list of signers now
includes more than 26,000 scientists from 170 countries.

Quoting the
PLoS FAQ: "No institution that asks for our money and voluntary
contributions of work and intellectual property has a right to take these for
granted."

The deadline for journals to comply and pledgers to act
is September 1. If you want to add weight to the PLoS call on journals,
there is still time to sign the web pledge. If you want to coordinate your
action with research and library colleagues, now is the time to talk to
them. If you want to write up this story for a journal covering your
discipline, now is a good time to start.

Start to watch your favorite
news sources and scholarly journals for responses to the pledge, the deadline,
and the action of pledgers. I imagine this story will be covered fairly
well in the scientific and mainstream press. But I also imagine that there
will be many small, telling episodes that never make the bigger news outlets,
including individual struggles with conscience by pledgers. If you learn
of any details not being covered elsewhere, or if you have thoughts on the PLoS
initiative, I hope you'll post them to our discussion forum.

In June the American
Psychological Association (APA) revised its policy on posting articles to the
internet. Authors may post unreviewed preprints to the web provided they
label them as unreviewed. The APA warns authors that some journals will
regard this as prior publication and will refuse to consider them. It does
not condemn or discourage this practice by journals, but at least it has dropped
the explicit endorsement contained in previous policy statement.

Authors
of articles accepted for publication in APA journals may post electronic
versions to their personal or institutional websites, but not to third-party
repositories, and may do so as soon as the articles are accepted. This is
a liberalization of the previous policy, which held that authors could not put
reviewed post-prints online until three years after print publication.
Authors may not create the digital version of an article by scanning the print
version from an APA journal. (Thanks to Christopher Green's 8/12 posting
to the September98-Forum for details on the APA's previous policy.)

*
Postscript. What positions do the major professional societies in your
discipline take on these questions? If you can find online policy
statements and send me the URLs, I'll collect them on a web page.

*
PPS. Since scholars can have FOS as soon as they decide to have it, it's
heartening to see professional associations take steps in the direction of
having it. The APA is ahead of most scholars and even more publishers in
its willingness to see scholarship free and online in some form. On the
other hand, it is still endorsing unnecessary impediments to FOS. This is
only a problem if you want to follow the professional associations and not lead
them. Bottom line: you needn't wait for publishers and you needn't
wait for professional associations. You can make an individual or
institutional archive for unreviewed preprints at any time. You and
colleagues can create new free online peer-reviewed journals at any time.
If you serve on the editorial board for an existing print journal, you and your
board colleagues can move the journal to the web at any time, divorcing your
current publisher if necessary. (For an inspiring example, see the
_Journal of Logic Programming_ story in our May 11 issue.)

* Mark Jordan of Simon Fraser University and Dave Kisly of
the British Columbia Electronic Library Network are conducting a survey on how
libraries handle electronic serials. They would like no more than one
reply per library. If you represent a library, share your thoughts before
the September 30 deadline. http://www.targetinform.com/eserials/

*
The Open eBook Forum is calling for all eBook stakeholders (e.g. readers,
publishers, librarians, vendors) to contribute "any need, want or wish that a
participant determines should be reviewed by others to facilitate an effective
and efficient ePublishing industry." http://www.openebook.org/requirements/

* The
National Technical Information Service (NTIS) wants your comments on its plan to
streamline access to technical reports. It proposes to enhance its search
engine hit links with digital object identifiers (DOIs) that resolve to the
copies of the reports in the agencies that created them. This will enable
users to link directly to free versions of the documents. By contrast,
downloading the same documents from NTIS is not free. (So what's the
catch?) Comments will be accepted until September 13.http://listserv.nlc-bnc.ca/cgi-bin/ifla-lwgate.pl/DIGLIB/archives/diglib.log0108/date/article-31.html

----------

New
on the net

* The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) home page has moved from
Los Alamos servers to Cornell University. Note the new URL.http://www.openarchives.org/

* Imagine a work of web
art which makes your browser window into an abstract map of Dewey Decimal
space. As you move your cursor around, you mouse over Dewey numbers
embedded in an ever-changing 3D grid of active links to real web pages. If
you click, you'll open a new window to the page your mouse is then highlighting,
although you will almost always be surprised what this page turns out to
be. It's cool and confusing at the same time. You'll hope this not
the future of online information cataloging, but you'll hope it influences that
future. It's Babel by Simon Biggs. (You'll need Shockwave
installed.)http://www.babel.uk.net/

*
The National Academies (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of
Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council) have launched
a web site on intellectual property topics, especially those that arise in the
scholarship and research. It contains a library of valuable papers, a
discussion forum, and a newsletter.http://ip.nationalacademies.org

* Yahoo is now
offering free online course management tools, which will make it a competitor
with WebCT, Blackboard, and other priced vendors. This is a good deal for
academics. But two provisos: (1) you might prefer MIT's free online
course management tools, which have the advantage of open source, and (2) Yahoo
has recently started charging for services it originally offered free of charge.

* In their September issue, the editors of _Smart Business_,
name Sigma-Aldrich as #20 among the Smart Business 50. These are companies
that make exceptional use of the internet. Sigma-Aldrich sells chemicals,
but won this distinction because it provides useful, voluminous, and free
information about its chemicals. The result is a free online content
provider as much as a for-profit chemical vendor.

* In the
August 15 _DigiNews_, Daniel Greenstein and Gerald George describe the Digital
Library Federation (DLF) project to develop a standard of minimum digital
fidelity when digitizing printed texts. A higher standard will enhance the
interoperability of different archives but exclude more legacy data. The
DLF will soon post its proposed standard to its web site for discussion and
approval.http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-4.html#featured

*
In the same issue of _DigiNews_, David Holdsworth and Paul Wheatley argue for
emulation as a method of digital preservation. Emulation goes beyond
preserving a data file to recreating the digital environment in which the file
can be viewed or executed.http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-4.html#feature2

*
In the August 14 issue of the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ Goldie Blumenstyk
tells how the Cal State University System used its large size to bargain for
more advantageous terms with netLibrary. Normally e-books purchased from
netLibrary may be read read or "borrowed" by only one library patron at a
time. Under the new contract, about half of Cal State's e-books from
netLibrary may be borrowed by an unlimited number of readers at once, and Cal
State pays no more for this arrangement. The Cal State director of e-book
projects who negotiated the deal is named Evan Reader.http://chronicle.com/free/2001/08/2001081401t.htm

*
In the August 10 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Andrea Foster describes the
disagreement between David Touretzky and Michael Shamos, both on the CS faculty
at Carnegie Mellon. Touretzky is a leading critic of the DMCA and
publicizes source code for bypassing encryption on DVDs and ebooks. Shamos
is a computer scientist, former IP lawyer, and former teacher of Touretzky, who
believes that Touretzky's actions unlawfully undermine e-commerce. The two
were expert witnesses on the opposite sides of the DeCSS case and may face each
other again in the Edward Felten case. http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i48/48a04501.htm

* In
the July 24 issue of _Time Magazine_, Katherine Bonamici asks how libraries will
far in the digital age if they must make ongoing payments in order to retain the
rights to the e-books they "buy". Both publishers and libraries are
waiting for a study by the Copyright Office on just this question --which was
due last fall. http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,168798,00.html

*
The Duke University Digital Library Initiatives Task Group recently put its
report online. The group was charged to develop a 3-5 year vision
statement for digital library initiatives and to suggest strategies to achieve
the vision.http://www.lib.duke.edu/dli/

* Sam Vaknin has posted
a review of the DOI-EB to his growing collection of articles on digital
content. The DOI-EB is an initiative to apply digital object identifiers
(DOIs) to e-books (EB's). His review also functions as a useful
introduction to DOIs. http://www.trendsiters.com/article1022.html

* Human
Rights Watch reports that China has further tightened controls over the
internet. It calls on corporate sponsors of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing
to use their influence to improve freedom of expression in China.

* On June 22, the DC Court of Appeals awarded billions of dollars'
worth of radio spectrum to NextWave Telecom, Inc. NextWave made the
highest bid for them, but when it defaulted on its payments, the FCC took the
spectrum licenses back. The court ruled that the licenses still belonged
to NextWave, which was going through bankruptcy at the time of the
default. On August 6, the FCC decided to appeal this decision to the
Supreme Court. This is only FOS-related because if NextWave wins, it will
diminish the proceeds from the spectrum auction, and hence undermine the very
attractive Digital Promise Project (DPP). The DPP is a proposal to set
aside $18 billion from the spectrum auction for digital media and digital
content to improve American education. This is a tough one. On the
one hand, I want to see fairness for debtors in bankruptcy; on the other, I want
to see the DPP fully funded.

* Our July 3 issue
described the precarious fate of PubScience after the Software & Information
Industry Association (SIIA), a trade association of for-profit publishers,
lobbied Congress to stop government subsidies for free online scholarship.
The SIIA even persuaded a House appropriations subcommittee to cut funding for
PubScience and adopt the SIIA's rationale as its own. Now, however, the
Senate has rejected the House measure and restored PubScience funding in its own
recent spending bill. Next month the House and Senate must agree on a final
version of the bill.

Only two weeks ago I announced that our
subscriber count had passed 400. Now it has passed 500. I thank all
of you again for announcing the newsletter in your own publications, forwarding
copies to colleagues, and spreading the word in other ways. You're turning
this into a real newsletter.

----------

Conferences

If you
plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your observations
with us through our discussion forum.

* 67th IFLA Council and General
Conference; Libraries and Librarians: Making a Difference in the Knowledge
Agehttp://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla67/Boston, August
16-25

Please feel free to forward this newsletter
to interested colleagues. If you are reading a forwarded copy of this
issue, you may subscribe yourself by signing up at the FOS home page or the FOS
Newsletter page.